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River Styx – 2011

Number 85

2011

Triannual

Bracha Goykadosh

Circles of Hell: think Dante’s ancient classic? This themed issue of River Styx examines, analyzes, and explicates the idea of hell both as a place and metaphor. The writers are creative, funny, and at times undeniably enthralling.

Circles of Hell: think Dante’s ancient classic? This themed issue of River Styx examines, analyzes, and explicates the idea of hell both as a place and metaphor. The writers are creative, funny, and at times undeniably enthralling.

My favorite part of the magazine, however, was not the written art on the page, but a series of photographs by Greg Sand entitled Snapshots. There is only one word to describe these photos: uncanny. “Family Reunion” is traditional family shot, however, all the subjects in this photograph lack faces—no eyes, noses, or mouths. Almost like clay dolls, they disorient the viewer. Most intriguing is the little boy in the left corner of the photograph. Apparently restless, the boy is getting up to leave. Without showing facial expressions, Sand manages to capture this little boy’s activeness, and blur of being, as his father holds him back. In fact, in most of Sand’s photos, he toys with this idea of being. Like “Family Reunion,” many of the subjects in his photographs lack faces or possess slightly altered ones (e.g. we only see the subject’s face through a mirror in another one). These spooky and thrilling photos convey a sense of anxiety and ethereality. (Do angels have faces? Does the devil?)

This issue also contains top-notch poetry. In Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s “The Afterlife,” the speaker dreams that she has entered that great-beyond: “it was so crowded, / hordes of people, everyone seeking someone, staggering.” When the speaker finds her mother, the mother proclaims: “Here is no help, no love, only the looking. This / is what death means, my child, this is how we pass / eternity, looking.” Despite the unbounded nature of life and death, Schwartz seems to be telling us that there are links that cannot be broken, things we will always be attached to.

All is not serious and morose in this issue. Michael Derrick Hudson is funny and playful in his poem “That Circle of Hell Reserved for American Men.” He writes:

The Devil asks how you are, if the air conditioning

is cool enough. He probes your politics, faith, philosophy,
aesthetics, and your ideas on the top ten ways

to maintain a healthy relationship.

Writers often characterize the devil, turning him (or her) into a figure with horns and a tail. Hudson, however, flips this cliché, and turns the devil into an annoyingly chatty inmate who “probes” and “plays” back what you say. The irony in this poem resides in its final line: “Your self-deprecation // sounds natural, irresistible. No bullshit / here. So you tell yourself the first ten thousand years or so.”

One promise: you’ll be in heaven as you read this Circle of Hell issue of River Styx.
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